THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; A Morality Tale About Everybody's Fall Guy

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: April 5, 1995

The Atlantic Theater Company's "Luck, Pluck and Virtue," written and directed by James Lapine, is a gelatinous satire that plays as if it had been conceived by someone locked too long in the stacks of the New York Public Library. The comedy opened last night.

In fact, Mr. Lapine is an active man of the theater. Among his other credits, he wrote the books for and directed Stephen Sondheim's "Passion," "Into the Woods" and "Sunday in the Park With George." He lives in the real world, though you wouldn't know it from his new work, a generalized, witless, upside-down morality tale set in a timeless void.

"Luck, Pluck and Virtue" has an impressive literary provenance. Though it loosely recalls Voltaire's "Candide," it was inspired by Nathanael West's 1934 novel, "A Cool Million," a travesty of Horatio Alger Jr.'s inspirational books for boys, including the "Luck and Pluck" series. These were written when optimism was still in flower over the last three decades of the 19th century.

The Alger credo: every boy who is frank, hard working and self-reliant can overcome poverty and temptation to obtain, if not riches, then a good position and respectability. Theodore Dreiser worked his own scathing variations on Alger's precepts in both "Sister Carrie" (1900) and "An American Tragedy" (1925).

Dreiser aimed great doomy thunderbolts at Alger; West preferred to demolish him with the kind of bitter humor that would become apocalyptic by the time of the last West novel, "The Day of the Locust" (1939). Mr. Lapine throws marshmallows.

"Luck, Pluck and Virtue" intends to be savage, but having no clear vision and no cutting edge, it's merely grotesque and lightweight. It's about the decline and fall of an innocent young fellow named Lester Price who, because he's frank, honest and ever credulous, becomes everybody's fall guy.

He is victimized by his mother, the bank in his hometown, Springfield, Ohio, a jewel thief he meets on the train to New York and the warden in a prison where he is sent for a robbery he didn't commit. In the course of his wanderings all his teeth are extracted, an eye is removed and a leg amputated. He is also scalped at one point, which gives him a chance to become a Hollywood star as "the last living American to be scalped." Through thin and thinner, Lester remains a resolute believer in the American Dream.

West, who died at the age of 36 in 1940, was shaped by World War I -- the war to end all wars -- and especially by the Depression, which forced a re-evaluation of the American system. Everything he wrote was tied to those desperate years when 19th-century verities were revealed to be less than eternal. "Luck, Pluck and Virtue" is tied to no particular time. Mention of television's Texaco Amateur Hour (Lester dreams of becoming an overnight star) recalls the 1950's, but other adventures suggest later periods.

Mr. Lapine's vision is blurred. He winds up satirizing institutions, beliefs and attitudes that are out of date, and doing it so broadly that the satire has no sting. Yet there certainly are plenty of things about our era that are ripe for lampooning, even in West's wildly overstated manner. "Luck, Pluck and Virtue" is fueled by borrowed skepticism.

The show is not a musical, though the lines often sound like song cues. It's presented as a series of vaudeville acts, each introduced by the Show Girl (Adrianne Krstansky), a saucy young woman who carries a card that announces the setting. Everything is played fast and big, as if it were a cartoon, a style that never compensates for the lack of comic content. Allen Shawn wrote the piano accompaniment, which is played by James Bassi.

The able cast is headed by Neil Patrick Harris, who plays Lester with the proper mixture of dopiness and (toward the end) resignation; Elaina Davis, as Lester's hometown girlfriend, who becomes a New York streetwalker; Marge Redmond, who appears as Lester's self-absorbed mom and in several other roles, and MacIntyre Dixon as an old man who notes sadly: "Unfortunately I'm a former politician. I have no skills."